It is the job of Reynaldo Guino-o to assess and maintain standards and best practices to support the Edinburgh International Conference Center’s focus on business excellence. The Edinburgh International Conference Center has close to 50 employees, hundreds customers from around the world, dozens or more of local contractors, and a community to which it is beholden to for sustainable events and fiscally responsible management practices. To help fulfill the organization’s vision to serve these communities, Guino-o’s says the organization is in the process of reviewing the different people management standards to support the organization’s business excellence strategy. He recently learned about ISO 10018 at a webinar conducted recently by QualityDigest.com sponsored by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance.

Explains Guino-o, “I am already aware of European standards on employee engagement but what intrigues me about ISO 10018 is the fact that it addresses all our stakeholders and that this new standard comes from an organization as well-known and established as ISO.” Adding credibility, he says, is the fact that the first certification is managed by University of Texas Medical Branch at TheICEE.org, which administers the management of ISO 260 human resources standards.

Guino-o says the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) is in the business of running successful events to generate economic impact for Edinburgh. The center, he explains, is used as a venue for conferences, exhibitions, trade shows, annual general meetings, cultural and sporting events, award ceremonies and other such events in a global market place with international and national customers. The better service and value proposition, he adds, the more events will come to Edinburgh.

While Guino-o says the organization has just begun the review process of selecting the standard to be used to address human capital, “The standard that makes sense is one that addresses the needs of all of our people, and that helps us make better use of our investments in people through the application of a systematic approach similar to the one we apply to quality management. I also like the idea of one single standard that tells all our stakeholders, our employees, customers, contractors, investors, and our community, that we are committed to addressing all their interests for mutual benefit. The standard can provide a road map for putting together all the well-defined approaches we employ to engage our stakeholders in a way we can measure and refine. One advantage we have here at the center is that there are no silos.”

Guino-o also noted the open-source, walk-before-your run approach to ISO 10018. “I see that we can do a gap analysis to determine specifically what we have to do and how to measure the return and that we can start by focusing on the process now and certification later.” He says his next step will be to use the EEA’s EE Benchmark Indicator to begin the gap analysis process needed to chart the way. “I cannot say yet whether we will go for the ISO certification, but I see that it provides a unique approach I have not seen before of connecting all the dots in the way I see has worked in quality management.”

Article sponsor: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance

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